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Performance Measurement

Strategy Driven

Supplementing profits with ROIC and revenue growth is a step in the right direction to ensure that the profits a business earns are actually creating value, not simply over-consuming capital that another company could better deploy. However, profits, ROIC, and revenue growth are backward looking.

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Death Knell for the Category Killers?

Harvard Business Review

During the current recession, overall consumer spending has declined or held flat, sales per square foot have not improved significantly, and retailers' return on invested capital (ROIC) has suffered dramatically. The most obvious victims of this shift so far are music, video, and book sellers.

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Untangling Skill and Luck

Harvard Business Review

Take, for instance, a group of companies that currently have high returns on invested capital (ROIC). If you follow that group over time, you would see their ROICs revert back toward the cost of capital. This means that an extreme outcome, good or bad, will be followed by an outcome that has an expected value closer to the mean.

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Even for Companies, the U.S. Is Split Between Haves and Have-Nots

Harvard Business Review

companies’ return on invested capital (ROIC), and compare it with economy-wide ROIC estimates constructed by Deloitte. Economywide ROIC has trended downward since the 1980s, falling from above 6% in the mid-1960s to 5% in 1980, then to 3% in 1990, and to only a bit more than 1% by 2010. An increasing number of U.S.

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Five Common Strategy Mistakes

Harvard Business Review

Moreover, when Porter defines strategy, he is really talking about what constitutes a good strategy — one that will result in a higher ROIC than the industry average. It's the positioning you choose that will result in achieving the goal; the actions are the path you take to realize the positioning. Mistake #5.

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I'm Afraid Bankers Really Do Earn Their Bonuses

Harvard Business Review

Like Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), which reflects what a company earns, how much capital it needs to earn it and the ratio between the two, ROIT reveals what the company earns, how much it has to spend on its talent to earn it, and what the ratio is between the two.

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What If Companies Managed People as Carefully as They Manage Money?

Harvard Business Review

A veritable alphabet soup (ROA, RONA, ROIC, ROCE, IRR, MVA, APV, and the like) exists to measure our financial capital. But today’s great CEOs need to be equally great at managing human capital. How can we manage human capital better? Measure it. As the adage goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.